Josh ChinVerified account

We confirmed a lot of what others have reported and we found out some new things. It’s incredibly difficult to dig up information about these camps, so I thought it would be helpful to describe how we did our reporting. 2/x

One big challenge has been the inability of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities abroad to talk about what’s happening back home, either because friends and family have cut off contact with them or because they’re afraid that talking will get their relatives sent to a camp. 3/x

This is slowly starting to change as the situation becomes more desperate. My colleague @evadou talked to roughly 30 exiled Uighurs who have family members in the camps, including some who let use their real names despite the immense risks. 4/x

Ethnic Kazakhs who were detained in the camps and released (some of the only people to get out) have made their way into Kazakhstan and are starting to talk publicly (big h/t here to @gerryshih and @AP). My colleague @jnbpage talked to six of them in Almaty. 5/x

The stories of individual Uighur exiles and the former detainees match to a significant degree and paint a chillingly consistent picture of what’s happening both inside and outside the camps 6/x

Another thing we relied on heavily: satellite imagery. This is one channel of information that even the Chinese government can’t control, and it provides critical evidence of the existence and expansion of the camps. 7/x

We also got a lot of help from @mhanmam at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, who used satellite images from @planetlabs to help us analyze a camp near Kashgar we visited in November that has been metastasizing at a remarkable rate. 9/x

Another vital source of information is the work of @adrianzenz, who collected government construction bids and tender documents confirming 78 camps, worth a total of $755 million. 12/x

The government stopped posting construction bids publicly shortly after he published his initial research earlier this year. You can find a link to his paper here, which also digs into the historical roots of the campaign. 13/x https://jamestown.org/program/evidence-for-chinas-political-re-education-campaign-in-xinjiang/ …

Finally, there’s on-the-ground reporting. The mere act of talking to Uighurs puts them at risk, and police are quick to jump on any journalists they find snooping around, but you can still move around enough to get a sense of how people are living. 13/x

For example, in Turpan, I went to find the apartment where the parents of Murat Uyghur lived before they were sent to a camp. Here is it, in the corner of housing compound ringed with razor wire and patrolled by police: 15/x

We sent photos and satellite images to @shawnwzhang, who said the facility was similar to other camps he’s found: more school-like than a common detention-center, but with less security than a full-scale prison. 17/x

Last week at the UN, Chinese officials described the camps as “vocational schools” (which is how many are listed in government bids) designed to help minor criminals learn how to better integrate into society. 18/x

All other evidence suggests that is, at best, a disingenuously narrow presentation of the truth. Based on everything we and others have found, if the Uighurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang are learning anything, it’s that Chinese society doesn’t want them. 19/x

No one can predict what the ultimate consequences of all this will be, but as @adrianzenz put it to me, putting people in a constant state of fear “is something that can lead to many evil things.” FIN